From: Randall Randall (wolfkin@freedomspace.net)
Date: Wed Mar 24 1999 - 00:39:08 MST
I've lately thought that on Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Billy Brown wrote:
>Randall Randall wrote:
>>Billy Brown wrote:
>> >Nuclear bombs are complex devices, requiring exotic materials and large
>> >capital investments.
>>
>> Nuts. Not counting the actual explosives, one could build a
>> device for $10K. They really are not complex, Billy.
>
>To build a nuke, you need either plutonium or enriched uranium. Producing
>either of these materials requires a capital investment on the order of
>hundreds of millions of dollars (or much more if you want to produce it in
>volume).
This is the explosive of my post. However, since an anarchy will have
little problem with cheap, well-built nuclear reactors, this sort of
material will be commonly available.
>You also need special explosives (and thus a dedicated
>explosives
manufacturing plant)
Gunpowder, if you are using uranium. Really special, huh?
> very high precision manufacturing
>(still rather
expensive)
Basement machine shop will do.
>and some special electronics (probably adaptable from civilian
uses).
A $50 trip to Radio Shack for a timer and some miscellaneous parts.
>You also need some expensive experts to design the things, and a
Hm. Will Ted Taylor do? He was a nuke designer at Los Alamos,
and says in _The Curve of Binding Energy_ that it would be trivial
for a high school machine shop to build a nuke, and that all you
need to design a gun type device is in any decent public library
(did you know that you can interlibrary loan the _Plutonium Handbook_,
two very large and thick books on how to process plutonium and
every useful chemical compound involving it?). He even gives a
design for a gun type, that would fit in a typical garbage can. Not
elegant, you know, but hey...
>>large test range where you can try out the
prototypes.
Not only are gun type devices very reliable and predictable,
but IIRC, no detonation of a nuclear device has ever failed,
that we know of. Yields may vary, but you can be sure it will
go bang.
>Now, I'm sure all of these things will become less expensive as technology
>improves, but so will everything else. If technology advances bring the
>cost of a nuke down to a few thousand dollars, that implies that prices on
>other kinds of military equipment will also fall by a couple of orders of
>magnitude. That would lead to radical changes in every aspect of military
>operations, which means we would need to re-evaluate the whole subject from
>the ground up.
This is exactly what I've been saying. All you need for this scenario is
a fairly large market in such things.
>If you are going to assume that future technology increases the ability of
>the individual to purchase expensive hardware by three orders of magnitude,
>you should also assume that states get the same benefit. What do you think
>the U.S. military look like if it had an annual budget of $100 trillion
>dollars?
Bloated, even more than it is now.
-- Wolfkin. wolfkin@freedomspace.net | Libertarian webhost? www.freedomspace.net On a visible but distant shore, a new image of man; The shape of his own future, now in his own hands.-- Johnny Clegg.
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